A Green vote will only make it easier for the Conservatives or UKIP to get elected

The Green Party have been leafleting, this one has been going through letterboxes in Westborough and Blenheim Park wards recently.

This is headed ‘there is a better way’ – true, but the Green way (if Brighton is anything to go by) is not it.

There is much in Green Party policy that I can applaud, but there are some issues that I stand some distance from them. We have to protect the environment, for instance, but this does not have to come without economic growth and improving prosperity.

I am not keen on the idea of a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Whilst the EU is in need of reform, exit would make us less safe and poorer.

Whilst a redistributive element to taxation policy is something most socialists would advocate, I am not sure about a wealth tax. If this a tax on assets such as money held in banks then this can quite easily be avoided.

If voters want many of these policies though, they would be better to vote for a party that can actually implement them. A vote for a Green candidate often allows the reverse of what is intended; in Kursaal ward last year, for example, Green votes allowed a UKIP councillor to sneak in, past the Labour candidate.

For a fairer and more equal society, and one that looks after the environment, vote Labour. A Green vote will only make it easier for the Conservatives or UKIP to get elected.

6 Responses to A Green vote will only make it easier for the Conservatives or UKIP to get elected

Labour care about the environment? They just abstained from the vote for fracking. Doesn’t seem like caring to me. No EU referendum? Isn’t that what democracy is about, choosing what this country wants by asking the people? No wealth tax? Because that’s economic equality. A vote for the Greens does not mean Tories/UKIP get in, it means that your campaigning is failing and people decide not to vote for Labour because of these barbaric wars you have put us through, let people vote for themselves and what they believe in, even if it is the Tories.

The “Vote Green, get Tory/UKIP” argument is pretty feeble. It is going to hold true in some constituencies, but this isn’t one of them. At the last election the Conservatives and Lib Dems took over 75% of the vote between them in Southend West.
The Green Party now has more members than either UKIP or the Lib Dems and its policies are the most popular of all UK parties according to http://voteforpolicies.org.uk
Your claim that Labour will give you a fairer and more equal society is laughable. In their last term in office, they demonstrated themselves to be the party of the status quo, bailing out the banks and making the rich richer. And locally, the party has an abysmal record on the environment, refusing a public inquiry into the expansion of Southend Airport thereby preventing proper democratic accountability and massively increasing the borough’s greenhouse gas emissions.